Open source licensing suits settle in short order

Many open source licences are only two or three paragraphs long and read more like a manifesto than a traditional software licence. The simple but unorthodox nature of open source licences, along with the fact that the software is provided “free,” has lulled many into a false sense that these licences must surely be unenforceable and that the use and redistribution of open source software will have no consequences.

This attitude belies the fact that despite a superficial and non-legalistic veneer, open source licences rely on traditional copyright principles and contract law – albeit in a non-traditional way – and therefore are prima facie enforceable. However, despite widespread adoption and significant use of open source software over the past 20 years, little jurisprudence has developed to determine exactly to what extent open source licences will be enforced.

In light of the dearth of case law, many have been carefully watching four recent claims brought by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. These are purportedly the first claims in the U.S. regarding the GNU General Public License (GPL), one of the most common and influential open source licences. The New York-based SFLC provides legal representation to non-profit open source developers and projects to protect and foster the development of open source software.

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Red Hat News

Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!
In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.

With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments. The new offering combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for greater operational and organizational efficiency.

The firm recently celebrated 25 years in business, and according to Miles, Red Hat is as strong as ever. Four years into his tenure at the company here in the Middle East, he has been “pleasantly surprised” and “very impressed” that regional organisations are already pursuing strong strategies in open source.

Red Hat launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for telcos and enterprises that combines OpenStack compute with its Ceph storage.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is an open, integrated platform for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.
Announced Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit, the new platform blends Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into a single user experience for hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said it was the biggest contributor to both open source projects.

Debian and Derivatives

More demos of vnlog and feedgnuplot usage! This is pretty pointless, but should be a decent demo of the tools at least. This is a demo, not documentation; so for usage details consult the normal docs.
Each Wednesday night I join a group bike ride. This is an organized affair, and each week an email precedes the ride, very roughly describing the route. The two organizers alternate leading the ride each week, and consequently the emails alternate also. I was getting the feeling that some of the announcements show up in my mailbxo more punctually than others, and after a recent 20-minutes-before-the ride email, I decided this just had to be quantified.
The emails all go to a google-group email. The google-groups people are a wheel-reinventing bunch, so talking to the archive can't be done with normal tools (NNTP? mbox files? No?). A brief search revealed somebody's home-grown tool to programmatically grab the archive:

To whom it may concern, this is my report over the first few weeks of gsoc under the umbrella of the Debian project. I’m writing this on my way back from the minidebconf in Hamburg, which was a nice experience, maybe there will be another post about that ;)
So, the goal of my GSOC project is to design and implement a new SSO solution for Debian. But that only touches one part of the projects deliveries. As you can read in the description Alexander Wirth originally posted in the Debian Wiki, the project consists of two parts, where the first one is the design and coding of a new backend and self-service interface for Debian guest users (this includes the accounts of Debian Maintainers).

Compared to its previous releases, Debian-based Parrot 4.0 ethical hacking distro has arrived with a lot more changes. The development team has called it an important milestone in the history of the project.

Openwashing and 'Open' Beer

The Kaspersky Labs report issued on May 10th, 2018 has garnered a lot of media attention based on its claim of having identified 17 security issues in some OPC UA implementations. A detailed description of the 17 issues can be found at https://opcfoundation.org/security/.

In a recent blog post, Intel and Wind River have announced their intent to make open source some of the components from the Wind River Titanium Cloud portfolio. The code is now being upstreamed in a new open source project called StarlingX, hosted by the OpenStack Foundation.
Wind River Titanium Cloud was built on open source components, which are then extended and targeted to be hardened to address critical infrastructure requirements: high availability, fault management, and performance management needed for continuous 24/7 operation. Wind River Titanium Cloud also includes the low latency, high performance, scalability, and security needed for edge and IoT workloads.

Mozilla is seriously into open-source. So seriously, in fact, that developer doesn’t just want to see it restricted to software. In its eyes, just about anything can go open-source. Even beer.
To prove it, Mozilla teamed up with Widmer Brothers, a brewery based in Portland, Oregon. The companies crafted a survey for community input on the style, hops, and any special additions drinkers might want to see. Responses were tabulated, weighed, and turned into a recipe by the brewers at Widmer.

Back End: Cask, Kubernetes, OpenStack

Last week Cask Data, known for its open source Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), announced that it's being acquired by Google -- specifically Google's cloud division.
"We are thrilled to announce that Cask Data, Inc. will be joining Google Cloud!" the company's founders, Jonathan Gray and Nitin Motgi, said in its online announcement of the purchase.

"With Kubernetes-as-a-Service, we are providing the industry’s simplest Kubernetes consumption model by delivering it fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications," Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president of private clouds at Rackspace, stated.
"Rackspace’s combination of operational experience and open source expertise, coupled with the security, improved economics and a fully managed Kubernetes offering available on leading public and private cloud technologies, helps companies accelerate their digital transformation,” Crenshaw continued.

The OpenStack Foundation is no longer interested in only its own cloud platform, but also in enabling the broader ecosystem of open infrastructure
In a session at the OpenStack Summit, Thierry Carrez, VP of Engineering at the OpenStack Foundation, outlined the steps the foundation are taking to create what he referred to as a better-defined OpenStack. The key theme of the redefinition is that OpenStack is no longer just about the OpenStack cloud platform project.

The OpenStack Foundation announced on May 22 the Kata Containers 1.0 release which is designed to bolster container security.
The Kata Containers project provides a virtualization isolation layer to help run multi-tenant container deployments in a more secure manner than running containers natively on bare-metal. The effort provides a micro-virtual machine (VM) layer that can run container workloads.

Latest News

Announcing “e Foundation” for eelo

I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.
“e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.
This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.
As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.

RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.
The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.
Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone's actual hardware ready.